'Elvis is back in the building'

They don't drive a fire truck, point a fire hose at flames or wear dirty, smoky overalls, but the CFA has two new officers trying to improve the safety of thousands of Victorians this bushfire season.

On high fire-risk days a designated social media officer will be based in the state control centre, with a brief to reach out to people via Twitter and Facebook.

A second officer, a social media monitor, will be assigned to scan the internet on such days, searching for any extra pieces of information floating around the digital world about fires or other emergency incidents that could help the CFA's intelligence bank and response.

This fire season CFA crew members, such as Boronia's Scott Fischer, Tim McKern and Rob Gater, will be backed up by two new social media officers. Photo: Rob Carew

But the CFA's use of social media is not restricted to days when fires are burning, or days that are high risk. Fifty-two weeks a year, in business hours, the CFA's digital media team engages with people via Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes they might be answering a question about how to become a volunteer firefighter.

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Fire warnings and incident updates are automatically posted on the CFA's Twitter account @cfa_updates. They are shorter than the full warning but include the type of incident, level of warning, location and time. Each tweet also contains a link to the full warning on the CFA website. Full warnings and updates are automatically posted on the CFA's Facebook page.

On high-risk days the social media officer monitors the CFA's Facebook page and Twitter account, posts updates and responds to questions about fires.

The CFA is happy for the information exchange to be two-way. "We want the community to give us information via social media," says CFA digital media manager Martin Anderson.

The CFA may not have the Twitter presence of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has a staggering 1.17 million followers, but its following is rising. On Thursday last week, when the mercury hit 39.6 degrees in Melbourne and much of northern Victoria baked in temperatures above 40 degrees, an extra 300-400 people started following the CFA.

Now, about 8500 people follow @cfa_updates, while 8000 people follow @cfa_connect, an account primarily aimed at CFA staff and volunteers.

While @cfa_updates has 8500 followers, Mr Anderson says a CFA tweet can reach a lot more people than that.

"We find that we reach about 35,000 or 40,000 people with retweets and so on," he says. Others can benefit from the information even if they are not on Twitter, he says, via word of mouth.

The numbers are much greater for Facebook, where the CFA has more than 105,000 "likes", up from about 80,000 one year ago.

Social media is becoming an increasingly important tool for the CFA. "As more and more people use social media and use smartphone devices and mobile devices, it becomes a more and more important source of information for people," Mr Anderson says.

"Compared to even a year ago there's no longer a debate within the emergency services over whether or not we should be using social media, the question is how we do it and how do we do it effectively," he says. "It's so pervasive now in society, and there are so many case studies and examples of where it's been used effectively in other emergency and disaster situations.

"We don't want people ever to rely on [just] one source of information, we want to have these multiple mediums available to people. And this is becoming a more important one of them," he says.

In the digital world an app known as Fire Ready has proved very popular. Launched in 2010, it has been downloaded 93,000 times. A function on it known as Fire Watch allows people to set up geographic zones, so that if a fire warning is issued pertaining to their zone, they get a notification automatically sent to their phone.

The app, which is free, is compatible with iPhones and certain Android devices.